Sunday, September 18, 2016

U.S. wire payments to Iran Prove Obama Lied About Money Laundering

It's been proven that the United States made at least two separate payments to the Iranian government via wire transfer within the last 14 months, a Treasury Department spokesman admitted Saturday. So President Barack Obama was not telling the truth when he said that such payments were impossible.

This proves that the president knowingly lied, that the payments in cash were open appeasement to Iran as well as ransom for hostages, and constituted outright felony money laundering.

Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) discovered the two wire transfer payments during briefings with Obama administration officials.

At an August 4, 2016 press conference about a $400 million payment delivered in cash to the Iranian government that coincided exactly with the release of hostages Iran was holding, Obama said, “The reason that we had to give them cash is precisely because we are so strict in maintaining sanctions and we do not have a banking relationship with Iran that we couldn't send them a check and we could not wire the money.”

But a Treasury Department spokesman has now revealed that on at least two occasions, the U.S. did make payments to the Iranian government using wire transfers.

In July 2015, the U.S. government paid the Islamic republic $848,000 over a claim over architectural drawings and fossils that are now housed in Iran. Isn't it nice that our president is so scrupulous about paying Iranian claims when he won't allow U.S. citizens to sue Iran in our courts for damages? The second payment was made in April 2016,when the U.S. wired Iran $9 million to remove 32 metric tons of its heavy water from the Arak heavy water plant which is used to produce plutonium that can be used to make nuclear weapons:

The Treasury Department spokesman explained that the lifting of those sanctions allowed Iran “to gain incremental access to the international financial system, which opened up more options for executing transactions, such as the heavy water transaction” that occurred in April 2016. The spokesman declined to offer an explanation as to why the July 2015 payment was possible despite the full array of sanctions in place at the time.

Actually, both these payments violated sanctions still in place based on Iran's human rights abuses. The July 2015 payment was made while both human rights and nuclear-related sanctions were still in place, while the April 2016 payment was made while the human rights sanctions were in place.

That $400 million cash payment that Obama said could not have been delivered except in cash was part of a larger $1.7 billion settlement with Iran, the remainder of which was also delivered in cash. The president also claimed that the $400 million wasn't a ransom, but was paid to settle a dispute over military equipment ordered by the shah of Iran before the Ayatollahs took over.

The normal procedure is that the contracts are signed and the consignee (the purchasing country) goes to a large bank and obtains a Letter of Credit in the amount required. A Letter of Credit is a guarantee from a bank on behalf of one of its customers (in this case, Iran) to the seller's bank that the seller (in this case, the U.S.) will be paid in full to the amount of the Letter of Credit as long as the contracted goods and services are delivered.

To restate this more simply, the buyer's bank guarantees payment (normally they have the funds on hold) to the seller's bank when the buyer receive what they ordered.
Since, as President Obama told us, the arms were never shipped to the Ayatollahs, the money was never released to America by Iran's bank either.

So yes, that $400,000,000, was ransom money. And our president lied once again, without being challenged by a servile press.

And the reason it was released in cash? Simple...the Ayatollahs wanted a huge, physical amount of cash to photograph and humiliate America for propaganda purposes. Also, cash is fungible and easier to use without a paper trail to trace it. This was money laundering, plain and simple. And that is a felony.